9 Upcoming Movies Studios Have No Confidence In

7. Ad Astra

The Movie

A sci-fi drama from writer-director James Gray (The Immigrant, The Lost City of Z), starring Brad Pitt as an engineer who travels through the solar system to track down his father (Tommy Lee Jones), who disappeared 20 years earlier on a mission seeking out alien life.

The supporting cast meanwhile includes Ruth Negga, Donald Sutherland and, believe it or not, Jamie Kennedy.

What's Wrong?

Though there's an absurd amount of talent attached to this movie, we know curiously little about it given that it's still listed on Disney's release slate for May 24 of this year.

Between the single official image released for the movie, test screenings recently being cancelled and Gray himself admitting that the film was "far from finished" late last year, it's just a matter of time before the film's release date slips for the second time (having been originally slated for January).

Gray is a notoriously painstaking editor and a perfectionist, but given that the film started shooting 20 months ago, that's an especially long incubation period even for a director of Gray's discerning manner.

With Disney now handling distribution of the film following their acquisition of Fox, it's quite likely that, short of the film blowing everyone away at a festival premiere, they'll quietly dump it in cinemas later in the year with minimal advertising, simply as part of their obligation to Fox.

It'd be great to be wrong about this, but Ad Astra is a $50 million sci-fi film from a card-carrying "art-house" director whose films usually don't turn a profit theatrically.

There's good reason for Disney to have little interest in it when their 2019 slate is so full with far more commercially promising prospects, to say nothing of how the film might be received critically.